Last fall Dortmund introduced a novel and striking training device that could be compared to a mixed-martial arts cage or the Thunderdome of movie fame (one player enters, one player leaves), a kind of science-fiction approach to honing an individual's technical skills — the Footbonaut.
Flying in an F-14 squadron from the aircraft carrier Enterprise, then-Lieutenant McDowell dropped 6,000 pounds of munitions in the war's first week, destroying Taliban aircraft and vehicles at Herat airfield and striking training camps and barracks in Kandahar Province.
Out on the dance floor, women were tripping over the striking trains that fanned out from the bottoms of their gowns as they gyrated to the 80's hits.
This approached the previous week's record turnout, although the strike rate dipped: from 40% to 30% at the national railway, from 19% to 12% among civil servants, and from 18% to 15% at EDF, the energy utility.But it was not marching protesters or striking train drivers who shifted the atmosphere so abruptly this week.
Additionally, the striking train was in automatic mode and so the on-board software should have stopped the train.
In this case, NTSB's Hersman confirmed that, "the first car [of the striking train] overrode the rear car [of the struck train], and much of the survivable space on that first car of the striking train was compromised".
The desperate and unemployed, lurking around overpriced bars at three in the afternoon, would insist to anyone of the opposite sex within earshot that they were actually a striking train driver.
Chris Finn, a striking train operator with 17 years experience, said that radio communications Saturday revealed that a controller at BART headquarters warned the train operator of people on or near the track -- as is customary.
The operator of the striking train applied the emergency brake after the stopped train came into full view but there was not enough time to prevent the collision, which occurred at approximately 44mph.
The Ottoman engineer Taqi al-Din described a weight-driven clock with a verge-and-foliot escapement, a striking train of gears, an alarm, and a representation of the moon's phases in his book The Brightest Stars for the Construction of Mechanical Clocks (Al-Kawākib al-durriyya fī wadh' al-bankāmat al-dawriyya), written around 1556.
Finally, there is the Wood Memorial winner, Tapit, a striking gray trained by the eccentric Michael Dickinson, an Englishman who does his conditioning in seclusion on a 200-acre farm in Maryland.
